Great Winogrand NYC Exhibition - The Man Who Took A Million Photos

I went to see it while I was down in NYC in early June. It was absolutely amazing.

The entryway to the exhibition has a Kodak Ektagraphic slide projector on a timer going through some of his slides. The main gallery room simulates the old-projector experience, but with digitally rear-projected images in eight different groups (arranged by themes).

The also have a separate section with a short documentary that is just following Garry in a-day-in-the-life of sort of way. I believe excerpts of this were used in the new documentary, All Things Are Photographable (out on iTunes). They also had a selection of some of his most famous B&W prints.

Worth the trip for sure!
 
When Winogrand was teaching his photography classes at UT in Austin, he would spend only one class per semester showing his color work. If you took all four semesters of his "photo sequence," the third was a whole semester of color. STudents were required to turn in 10 slides to get an A for the semester. It was interesting to see his color work, but he didn't show it very often.

Wish I could see this exhibit too.
 
I went to see this last weekend. The color work was really interesting. Much more static than his B&W work. Due to the slow speed of Kodachrome at that time he was forced to shoot more stationary subjects unless he was in very bright sun. I liked a lot of it.

They also had 25 of his B&W prints from their archives on display and this is where they dropped the ball. The lighting was so poor it was impossible to see the quality of the prints. I guess they were beautiful, but I'll never know. I was pretty bummed out because I really wanted to see his original prints. Oh, well.... I still enjoyed the color exhibit.
 
I went to see this last weekend. The color work was really interesting. Much more static than his B&W work. Due to the slow speed of Kodachrome at that time he was forced to shoot more stationary subjects unless he was in very bright sun. I liked a lot of it.

They also had 25 of his B&W prints from their archives on display and this is where they dropped the ball. The lighting was so poor it was impossible to see the quality of the prints. I guess they were beautiful, but I'll never know. I was pretty bummed out because I really wanted to see his original prints. Oh, well.... I still enjoyed the color exhibit.

I have a theory as to why the lighting so bad for his B&W work.... It was known that Garry wasn't the great darkroom tech and he didn't properly fix his prints and some of them have started to yellow so keeping the lighting down is helping preserve those prints... sucks but that's just the way it is...
 
Can you imagine Winogrand shooting digital?? 1 million could have easily turned into 2 million maybe more... haha
 
I have a theory as to why the lighting so bad for his B&W work.... It was known that Garry wasn't the great darkroom tech and he didn't properly fix his prints and some of them have started to yellow so keeping the lighting down is helping preserve those prints... sucks but that's just the way it is...


Oh man! Is this true? What a bummer. Have to go see it soon then!
 
Oh man! Is this true? What a bummer. Have to go see it soon then!

I remember seeing his prints at an exhibition here in Chicago in the mid 2000's they you could see they were yellowing and they had to have the lights down on the lower side.... I'm sure with time they might have gotten worse... So its definitely true.
 
The whole point of negative film is reproduction. To show yellowing crappy prints is ridiculous. They're not paintings; reprint them so we can see what Winogrand wanted us to see...
 
I don't even know why they included the black and white work frankly. They felt like an afterthought at best.

After seeing these beautiful color projections, I had absolutely zero desire to see his black and white work (which I've seen before).

It was called Gary Winogrand "Color".
 
I think I prefer Winogrand's color work to his B/W, though I have to say this is more due to it having the feel of capturing a place and time than anything else - his 1960s stuff look very like that era as far as I can tell.

But having said this I must also say that I prefer (say) Fred Herzog and Saul Leiter to Winogrand as they seem to have a better knack of making interesting and artistic compositions than he does (in my view). Winogrand's photos seem somehow more "random" than theirs (not helped by holding the camera on a diagonal so often - something that I think gets "old" quickly). Not saying its bad just less desirable to me than the others named. I am sure others disagree though which is perfectly fine.
 
The whole point of negative film is reproduction. To show yellowing crappy prints is ridiculous. They're not paintings; reprint them so we can see what Winogrand wanted us to see...


I know Winogrand worked differently so I agree, but in the U.S. fine art photography world the prints made by the photographer or, failing that, approved by the photographer carry more weight and value as they are taken as fully representative of the artist's intention. Since there are after all many ways a negative can be printed, it is not so simple as just reprinting negatives. (Although indeed many were printed by others after his death from negatives he didn't get around to processing.)
 
I know Winogrand worked differently so I agree, but in the U.S. fine art photography world the prints made by the photographer or, failing that, approved by the photographer carry more weight and value as they are taken as fully representative of the artist's intention. Since there are after all many ways a negative can be printed, it is not so simple as just reprinting negatives. (Although indeed many were printed by others after his death from negatives he didn't get around to processing.)

Yep, prints by the photographer or prints approved by the photographer definitely have more weight.. Than ones just printed by others...
 
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